Andrew Coyne: A dispute between rival aboriginal factions

Andrew Coyne, Postmedia News01.06.2013

Andrew Coyne is a national columnist for Postmedia News

Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence stands with fellow hunger strikers Jean Sock, right in blue, Raymond Robinson, second from right in green, and supporter Danny Metatawabin, left, during a press conference outside her teepee on Victoria Island in Ottawa on Friday, January 4, 2013. Spence has been on a hunger strike for more than three weeks.Sean Kilpatrick
/ The Canadian Press

OTTAWA — If it does nothing else, the Idle No More movement of the past few weeks will have provided a valuable lesson in why so many aboriginal Canadians remain so chronically destitute — why progress has been so frustratingly elusive, and why it is likely to remain so.

The movement, with its vast and ill-defined agenda, its vague and shifting demands, its many different self-appointed spokespersons, is open to any number of different interpretations. But the absolutist rhetoric, the dismissal of dissenting opinion as so much “racism” and, above all, the rigid insistence on adhering to the same approaches that have so signally failed to date, do not suggest a happy future for aboriginal relations.

Ostensibly the movement’s ire is directed at the Harper government, though for reasons that are not widely understood. The four Saskatchewan women whose protests first ignited the movement may have been focused on Bill C-45, the omnibus budget bill — notably its provisions relaxing federal oversight of navigable waterways and lowering the threshold of democratic approval needed for bands to authorize development on reserve land.

But as more and more putative leaders have jumped in front of the parade, from Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence to Pam Palmater, the Mi’kmaw activist and Ryerson University chair in indigenous governance, the checklist has expanded to include the whole of the Harper government’s approach to aboriginal issues. Contrary to early media reports, it is not Stephen Harper’s neglect that inspires their wrath, but rather his activism.

In Palmater’s writings, the Harper agenda is nothing less than the deliberate “genocide” of aboriginal peoples, in the most literal sense of the word: not merely their “assimilation” or “termination,” in the ambiguous terminology preferred by other native leaders, but their complete elimination, “socially, culturally, legally and physically.” Though her most oft-cited specific evidence of this is the reduction in funding to aboriginal activist groups, she is in no doubt that the Harper agenda is about “getting rid of Indians once and for all.”

Nor is she alone in this belief. Here’s Daniel Wilson, a former senior director with the Assembly of First Nations: “Indigenous death and despair serve the government’s purpose … through underfunding and interference with local governance, the current government is starving people off reserves (to) make it easier for the government’s friends in the oil, gas and mining industries to go about their business unhindered.”

How is this murderous agenda being pursued? Among the dozen or so bills activists cite are the following: Bill S-8: The Safe Drinking Water for First Nations Act; Bill S-2: The Family Homes on Reserve and Matrimonial Interests or Right Act; Bill S-6: The First Nations Elections Act; and Bill C-27: The First Nations Financial Transparency Act. Oh, and: Bill S-212: The First Nations Self-Government Recognition Bill. Those monsters.

If you are puzzled how providing safe drinking water or recognizing self-government add up to genocide, well, you need to take responsibility for your own racism. But here’s the thing. If you interpret Harper’s motives and actions in such a fantastic light, then it is not just his government you must denounce: It is anyone who collaborates with it.

And indeed, the longer Idle No More has gone on, the more it has become clear it is not so much a dispute between aboriginal Canadians and the Harper government, but between rival factions in the aboriginal community: between modernizers such as former chief Manny Jules, chairman of the First Nations Tax Commission, or Assembly of First Nations Chief Shawn Atleo, who are prepared to work with the Harper government, and what one might call the fundamentalists, such as Palmater.

The fundamentalists represent the traditional agenda of aboriginal activists, focused heavily on the legal and political arena. In this model, the advancement of aboriginal peoples is at heart a collective matter, based on treaty rights, land claims and reserves under communal property ownership.

The modernizers would not, I think, deny the importance of much of this. But their focus is less on abstract constitutional principles and more on giving individual natives and bands the tools they need to participate in a modern, market-based economy: education, for example, and property rights, a particular concern of Jules (he is co-author of Beyond the Indian Act: Restoring Aboriginal Property Rights).

For Palmater and her followers, this is at best weakness, at worst betrayal. “The days of waiting for the AFN to do something are over,” she writes. Last year’s Crown-First Nations gathering was a particular object of scorn: “Clearly, the AFN has crossed the line and no longer works on our behalf.” The Joint Action Plan that emerged from it, with its emphasis on education, accountability and economic development, is “the beginning of the end if we let it happen.”

Having been defeated last summer in her bid to unseat Atleo as AFN chief, Palmater evidently sees Idle No More as a chance for a do-over. Atleo, she writes, is in the “same category” as Sen. Patrick Brazeau, “who acts as Harper’s mouthpiece tearing apart First Nations at every chance he gets.” Still worse is Jules, “who now promotes the destruction of reserves and the biggest assimilation policy plan created in recent years.”

So as Harper and aboriginal leaders prepare to meet again, we should be under no illusion this will settle anything. For those, such as Palmater, who regard “individual opportunity” as “code words,” who insist the way forward is to return to “our traditional ways of governing, learning, trading, sustaining and relating,” such co-operation is not the solution. It’s the problem.

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